Vaporizing devices, including electronic vaporizers or e-vaporizer devices, allow the delivery of vapor containing one or more active ingredients by inhalation of the vapor. Electronic vaporizer devices are gaining increasing popularity both for prescriptive medical use, in delivering medicaments, and for consumption of tobacco and other plant-based smokeable materials, such as cannabis, including solid (e.g., loose-leaf) materials, solid/liquid (e.g., suspensions, liquid-coated) materials, wax extracts, and prefilled pods (cartridges, wrapped containers, etc.) of such materials. Electronic vaporizer devices in particular may be portable, self-contained, and convenient for use. Typically, such devices are controlled by one or more switches, buttons, or the like (controls) on the vaporizer, although a number of devices that may wirelessly communicate with an external controller (e.g., smartphone) have recently become available.
Vaporization by the application of heat may be performed by convection, conduction, radiation and/or other means, including various combinations of these. Although vaporizers that apply heat primarily by convection (so-called convection-based vaporizers) have been described, they are typically slower to heat and therefore less convenient than other, e.g., conduction or primarily conduction, vaporizers. In particular, it has been challenging to provide a portable/hand-held convection-based vaporizer that is sufficiently “on-demand” to provide immediate or near-immediate (e.g., within a few seconds or less) vaporization of a vaporizable material when a user draws on the vaporizer. Currently available convection-based portable vaporizers on the market do not provide such on-demand heating and vaporization. Typically, convection-based portable vaporizers require some set amount of heat-up time in order for the device to properly vaporize the material of interest, that may be lengthy enough to be often inconvenient to users, and may also take further time to cool down
For example, previously described convection-based portable vaporizers require some form of physical selection input from the user to turn on or enable the device. This has typically been executed through some form of mechanical switch or push-button; once the device is turned on, there is some amount of time (on the order of tens of seconds or minutes) required for the device to reach proper vaporization temperatures before the user can actively draw vapor using the device effectively. Using such convection-based portable vaporizers, some portion of any active ingredient of the vaporizable material can be lost to the ambient environment (and thereby unavailable to the user) due to, for example, relatively lengthy nonuse warm-up and cool-down periods at elevated temperatures and internal features of the vaporizers. In addition, such convection-based vaporizers may not be able to tightly control the air temperature that comes in contact with the material. That lack of air temperature control, together with varying air flow rates induced by the user, may cause the quality and quantity of the produced vapor to vary significantly. In particular, many so-called on-demand or “instant heat-up” vaporizers suffer from this problem; although the heating element may heat up very quickly, the air flow may not be adequately and/or uniformly heated. This may be due, at least in part, to the large thermal mass surrounding the heater, and wasted energy dissipated into the device instead of the circulating air. This may result in the user having to take multiple “puffs” or wait for an extended period of time before the device can produce quality vapor in adequate quantities for user satisfaction.